An Integrated Material Flows, Stakeholders and Policies Approach to Identify and Exploit Regional Resource Potentials

Material flows in the construction and demolition (C&D) sector remain high in many countries. But, their changes or reductions are essential for successful circular economies. Existing material flow analyses do not cover regional characteristics, stakeholders and impacts of policy measures and interactions.

We contribute a new, unprecedented way of integrating regional building and infrastructure material stock and flow modelling with stakeholders, policy measures, their impacts and mutual interactions. Stakeholders are considered with their objectives, influences, interactions, willingness to act, to cooperate or contribute to resource conservation. 31 policy measures are crystallized from literature and evaluated in two surveys regarding their expected impact, their bundling and temporal effects. The integrated bottom-up simulation model was tested for the federal state of Baden-Württemberg (Germany).

The results show that until 2030 net stock piling can be expected and secondary raw materials from building stock will be sufficient to supply future recycling concrete production until 2030. Most effective policy measures are additional cost/taxes on primary resources, increased disposal fees and curriculae adaption. ... mehrBundling these leads to a combined RESPOT of 30.8%. The results are useful for political decision makers, educational institutions, disposal site operators as well as primary and secondary raw material extraction industries.